With the emergence of the third generation (3G) mobile communication technologies and more advanced digital mobile technologies, the requirements for time synchronization are still on the rise. For the cost, security, and service requirements, time synchronization becomes more important. At present, the precision of time synchronization required by mobile services is microseconds. However, it is hard to implement high-precision time synchronization.
The IEEE1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) provides a basic mechanism for precision time synchronization between the master clock and the slave clock. The mechanism needs to collect sufficient time stamp information sent between the master clock and the slave clock, and adjust the time synchronization between the master clock and the slave clock according to the collected time stamp information.
During the implementation of the present invention, the inventor discovers the following problems in the prior art: for most optical and Ethernet systems, a synchronization pulse signal may be used to trigger the obtaining of needed time stamp information. For example, time stamps are obtained at the edge of a transmitted frame signal and the edge of a received frame signal. However, in passband transmission systems that transmit signals continuously in units of symbols, for example, discrete multi tone (DMT)-based systems and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based systems, there is no obvious boundary between symbols, and the receive end is difficult to obtain the time stamp information, making it difficult to implement precision time synchronization between the master clock and the slave clock.